Gifts Received

Tom Margolis's Page

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"I agree with Simon: We can posit that god can see all possible futures for all possible choices, and simply makes a choice. Just as when you might decide to put an egg in the fridge instead of dropping it, knowing the future consequences…"

"Maybe I can be clearer: I know if a drop an egg, it will break. I know if I put the egg in the fridge, it will get cold. I know the future results of my actions. I decide either to drop the egg or to put it in the fridge. I…"

"This kind of debate is specious because it's non-falsifiable: You can't logically assess the proposition of God's existence through the "problem of evil", because a believer can simply resolve any apparent…"

"This isn't a problem, actually. God could know the future based on the current state of the Universe, exercise free will to make a decision which changes that future, and then know that new future. Like me knowing that if I pull the…"

"Some morality is based on evolutionary and neurological development. Simple, most fundamental example: The development of empathy at around 1 year old in humans is universal and can be traced directly to development of certain structures and…"

"Actually, there are emergent properties in human neurology and psychology that are not directly rooted in evolutionary pressures. On the simplest level, the fact that we see afterimages after staring at a light source is an emergent property…"

"Human brains did not evolve to be perfect analytical machines - we are fuzzy, emotional, symbolic, magical thinkers by default. The argument that babies are not born atheists, and therefore atheism is an invalid perspective, holds as much…"

"However, there are perceptual/cognitive patterns, emotional triggers, and so forth, encoded in the human brain through evolution. Empathy is a hard-coded development (happens around 1 year of age, when a child starts to grasp that there is an…"

"This discussion is founded on the premise that there is an objective, eternally-defined "evil", which is like saying there is an objective. externally-defined "beauty" or "crudeness". These concepts are…"

"The foundation of morality is various hard-wired patterns in the brain, set there through evolutionary biology (with some arbitrary emergent properties mixed in). For instance: empathy - the Golden Rule - starts to develop around one year of…"

"There's no reason to believe that the Universe "began to exist" in the first place, nor that, if it did, a cause was necessary. Those assumptions apply observed pattern *within* the Universe to the Universe itself.
The idea of…"